The Bicameral Mind

Julian Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind, "Chapter 4 The Bicameral Mind"

We are conscious human beings. We are trying to understand human nature. The
preposterous hypothesis we have come to in the previous chapter is that
at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a
god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious.
This is almost incomprehensible to us. And since we are conscious, and
wish to understand, we wish to reduce this to something familiar in our
experience, as we saw was the nature of understanding in Chapter 2. And
this is what I shall attempt in the present chapter.

THE BICAMERAL MAN

Very little can be said to make the man side of it seem familiar to us,
except by referring back to the first chapter, to remember all the
things we do without the aid of consciousness. But how unsatisfying is
a list of nots! Somehow we still wish to identify with Achilles. We
still feel that there must, there absolutely must be something he feels
inside. What we are trying to do is to invent a mind-space and a world
of analog behaviors in him just as we do in ourselves and our
contemporaries. And this invention, I say, is not valid for Greeks of
this period.

Perhaps a metaphor of something close to that state might be helpful.
In driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver directing
myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged with little
consciousness.[1]
In fact my consciousness will usually be involved in something else, in
a conversation with you if you happen to be my passenger, or in thinking
about the origin of consciousness perhaps. My hand, foot, and head
behavior, however, are almost in a different world. In touching
something, I am touched; in turning my head, the world turns to me i in
seeing, I am related to a world I immediately obey in the sense of
driving on the road and not on the sidewalk. And I am not conscious of
any of this. And certainly not logical about it. I am caught up,
unconsciously enthralled, if you will, in a total interacting
reciprocity of stimulation that may be constantly threatening or
comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to the changes in traffic
and particular aspects of it with trepidation or confidence, trust or
distrust, while my consciousness is still off on other topics.

Now
simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral man
would be like. The world would happen to him and his action would be an
inextricable part of that happening with no consciousness whatever. And
now let some brand-new situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked
road, a flat tire, a stalled engine, and behold, our bicameral man would
not do what you and 1 would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel
our consciousness over to the matter and narrative out what to do. He
would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up
admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him non-consciously what to do.

THE BICAMERAL GOD

But what were such auditory hallucinations like?
Some people find it difficult to even imagine that there can be mental
voices that are heard with the same experiential quality as externally
produced voices. After all, there is no mouth or larynx in the brain!

Whatever brain areas are utilized, it is absolutely certain that such
voices do exist and that experiencing them is just like hearing actual
sound. Further, it is highly probable that the bicameral voices of
antiquity were in quality very like such auditory hallucinations in
contemporary people. They are heard by many completely normal people to
varying degrees. Often it is in times of stress, when a parent's
comforting voice may be heard.

Or
in the midst of some persisting problem. In my late twenties, living
alone on Beacon Hill in Boston, I had for about a week been studying and autistically pondering some of the problems in this book, particularly
the question of what knowledge is and how we can know anything at all.
My convictions and misgivings had been circling about through the
sometimes precious fogs of epistemologies, finding nowhere to land. One
afternoon I lay down in intellectual despair on a couch. Suddenly, out
of an absolute quiet, there came a firm, distinct loud voice from my
upper right which said, "Include the knower in the known!" It lugged me
to my feet absurdly exclaiming, "Hello?" looking for whoever was in the
room. The voice had had an exact location. No one was there! Not even
behind the wall where I sheepishly looked. I do not take this nebulous
profundity as divinely inspired, but I do think that it is similar to
what was heard by those who have in the past claimed such special
selection.

Such voices may be heard by perfectly normal people on a more continuing
basis. After giving lectures on the theory in this book, I have been
surprised at members of the audience who have come up afterwards to tell
me of their voices. One young biologist's wife said that almost every
morning as she made the beds and did the housework, she had long,
informative, and pleasant conversations with the voice of her dead
grandmother in which the grandmother's voice was actually heard. This
came as something of a shock to her alarmed husband, for she had never
previously mentioned it, since "hearing voices" is generally supposed to
be a sign of insanity. Which, in distressed people, of course, it is.
But because of the dread surrounding this disease, the actual incidence
of auditory hallucinations in normal people on such a continuing basis
is not known.

The
only extensive study was a poor one done in the last century in England.[2]
Only hallucinations of normal people when they were in good health were
counted. Of 7717 men, 7.8 percent had experienced hallucinations at
some time. Among 7599 women, the figure was 12 percent. Hallucinations
were most frequent in subjects between twenty and twenty-nine years of
age, the same age incidentally at which schizophrenia most commonly
occurs. There were twice as many visual hallucinations as auditory.
National differences were also found. Russians had twice as many
hallucinations as the average. Brazilians had even more because of a
very high incidence of auditory hallucinations. just why is anyone's
conjecture. One of the deficiencies of this study, however, is that in
a country where ghosts are exciting gossip, it is difficult to have
accurate criteria of what is actually seen and heard as an
hallucination. There is an important need for further and better
studies of this sort.[3]

Hallucinations in Psychotics

It
is of course in the distress of schizophrenia that auditory
hallucinations similar to bicameral voices are most common and best
studied. This is now a difficult matter. At a suspicion of
hallucinations, distressed psychotics are given some kind of
chemotherapy such as Thorazine, which specifically eliminates
hallucinations. This procedure is at least questionable, and may be
done not for the patient, but for the hospital which wishes to eliminate
this rival control over the patient. But it has never been shown that
hallucinating patients are more intractable than others. Indeed, as
judged by other patients, hallucinating schizophrenics are more
friendly, less defensive, more likable, and have more positive
expectancies toward others in the hospital than non-hallucinating
patients.[4]
And it is possible that even when the effect is apparently negative,
hallucinated voices may be helpful to the healing process.

At any rate, since the advent of
chemotherapy the incidence of hallucinatory patients is much less than
it once was. Recent studies have revealed a wide variation among
different hospitals, ranging from 50 percent of psychotics in the Boston City Hospital, to 30 percent in a
hospital in Oregon[5]
and even lower in hospitals with long-term patients under considerable
sedation. Thus, in what follows, I am leaning more heavily on some of
the older literature in the psychoses, such as Bleuler's great classic,
Dementia Praecox, in which the hallucinatory aspect of
schizophrenia in particular is more clearly seen.[6]
This is important if we are to have an idea of the nature ' and range of
the bicameral voices heard in the early civilizations.

The
Character of the Voices

The
voices in schizophrenia take any and every relationship to the
individual. They converse, threaten, curse, criticize, consult, often
in short sentences. They admonish, console, mock, command, or sometimes
simply announce everything that's happening. They yell, whine, sneer,
and vary from the slightest whisper to a thunderous shout. Often the
voices take on some special peculiarity, such as speaking very slowly,
scanning, rhyming, or in rhythms, or even in foreign languages. There
may be one particular voice, more often a few voices, and occasionally
many. As in bicameral civilizations, they are recognized as gods,
angels, devils, enemies, or a particular person or relative. Or
occasionally they are ascribed to some kind of apparatus reminiscent of
the statuary which we will see was important in this regard in bicameral
kingdoms.

Sometimes the voices bring patients to despair, commanding them to do
something and then viciously reproaching them after the command is
carried out. Sometimes they are a dialogue, as of two people discussing
the patient. Sometimes the roles of pro and con are taken over by the
voices of different people. The voice of his daughter tells a patient:
"He is going to be burnt alive!" While his mother's voice says: "He will
not be burnt!"[7]
In other instances, there are several voices gabbling all at once, so
that the patient cannot follow them.

Their
Locality and Function

In
some cases) particularly the most serious, the voices are not
localized. But usually they are. They call from one side or another,
from the rear, from above and below; only rarely do they come from
directly in front of the patient. They may seem to come from walls,
from the cellar and the roof, from heaven and from hell, near or far,
from parts of the body or parts of the clothing. And sometimes, as one
patient put it, "they assume the nature of all those objects through
which they speak-whether they speak out of walls, or from ventilators,
or in the woods and fields."[8]
In some patients there is a tendency to associate the good consoling
voices with the upper right, while bad voices come from below and to the
left. In rare instances, the voices seem to the patient to come from
his own mouth, sometimes feeling like foreign bodies bulging up in his
mouth. Sometimes the voices are hypostasized in bizarre ways. One
patient claimed that a voice was perched above each of his ears, one of
which was a little larger than the other, which is reminiscent of the
ka's and the way they were depicted in the statues of the pharaohs of
ancient Egypt, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter.

Very often the voices criticize a patient's thoughts and actions.
Sometimes they forbid him to do what he was just thinking of doing. And
sometimes this occurs even before the patient is aware of his
intention. One intelligent paranoid who came from the Swiss canton of
Thurgau harbored hostile feelings toward his personal attendant. As the
latter stepped into his room, the voice said in its most reproachful
tone before the patient had done anything, "There you have it! A Thurgauer beats up a perfectly decent private attendant!"[9]

Of
immense importance here is the fact that the nervous system of a patient
makes simple perceptual judgments of which the patient's 'self' is not
aware. And these, as above, may then be transposed into voices that
seem prophetic. A janitor coming down a hall may make a slight noise of
which the patient is not conscious. But the patient hears his
hallucinated voice cry out, "Now someone is coming down the hall with a
bucket of water." Then the door opens, and the prophecy is fulfilled.
Credence in the prophetic character of the voices, just as perhaps in
bicameral times, is thus built up and sustained. The patient then
follows his voices alone and is defenseless against them. Or else, if
the voices are not clear, he waits, catatonic and mute, to be shaped by
them or, alternatively, by the voices and hands of his attendants.

Usually the severity of schizophrenia oscillates during hospitalization
and often the voices come and go with the undulations of the illness.
Sometimes they occur only when the patients are doing certain things, or
only in certain environments. And in many patients, before the
present-day chemotherapy, there was no-single waking moment free from
them. When the illness is most severe, the voices are loudest and come
from outsider when least severe, voices often tend to be internal
whispers; and when internally localized, their auditory qualities are
sometimes vague. A patient might say, "They are not at all real voices
but merely reproductions of the voices of dead relatives." Particularly
intelligent patients in mild forms of the illness are often not sure
whether they are actually hearing the voices or whether they are only
compelled to think them, like "audible thoughts," or "soundless voices,"
or "hallucinations of meanings."

Hallucinations must have some innate structure in the nervous system
underlying them. We can see this clearly by studying the matter in
those who have been profoundly deaf since birth or very early
childhood. For even they can—somehow-- experience auditory
hallucinations. This is commonly seen in deaf schizophrenics. In one
study, 16 out of 22 hallucinating, profoundly deaf schizophrenics
insisted they had heard some kind of communication.[10]
One thirty-two-year-old woman, born deaf, who was full of
self-recrimination about a therapeutic abortion, claimed she heard
accusations from God. Another, a fifty-year-old congenitally deaf
woman, heard supernatural voices which proclaimed her to have occult
powers.

The
Visual Component

Visual hallucinations in schizophrenia occur less commonly, but
sometimes with extreme clarity and vividness. One of my schizophrenic
subjects, a vivacious twenty-year-old writer of folk songs, had been
sitting in a car for a long time, anxiously waiting for a friend. A
blue car coming along the road suddenly, oddly, slowed, turned rusty
brown, then grew huge gray wings and slowly flapped over a hedge and
disappeared. Her greater alarm, however, came when others in the street
behaved as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Why? Unless all of
them were somehow in league to hide their reactions from her. And why
should that be? It is often the narratization of such false events by
consciousness, fitting the world in around them in a rational way, that
brings on other tragic symptoms.

It
is interesting that profoundly deaf schizophrenics who do not have
auditory hallucinations often have visual hallucinations of sign
language. A sixteen-year-old girl who became deaf at the age of eight
months indulged in bizarre communication with empty spaces and
gesticulated to the walls. An older, congenitally deaf woman
communicated with her hallucinated boyfriend in sign language. Other
deaf patients may appear to be in constant communication with imaginary
people using a word salad of signs and finger spelling. One
thirty-five-year-old deaf woman, who lost her hearing at the age of
fourteen months, lived a life of unrestrained promiscuity alternating
with violent temper outbursts. On admission, she explained in sign
language that every morning a spirit dressed in a white -robe came to
her, saying things in sign language which were at times frightening and
which set the pace of her mood for the day. Another deaf patient would
spit at empty space, saying that she was spitting at the angels who were
lurking there. A thirty-year-old man, deaf since birth, more benignly,
would see little angels and Lilliputian people around him and believed
he had a magic wand with which he could achieve almost anything.

Occasionally, in what are called acute twilight states, whole scenes,
often of a religious nature, may be hallucinated even in broad daylight,
the heavens standing open with a god speaking to the patient. Or
sometimes writing will appear before a patient as before Belshazzar. A
paranoid patient saw the word poison in the air at the very
moment when the attendant made him take his medicine. In other
instances, the visual hallucinations may be fitted into the real
environment, with figures walking about the ward, or standing above the
doctor's head, even as I suggest Athene appeared to Achilles. More
usually, when visual hallucinations occur with voices, they are merely
shining light or cloudy fog, as Thetis came to Achilles or Yahweh to
Moses.

The
Release of the Gods

If
we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallucinations are similar
to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common
physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply
stress. In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold
for release of hallucinations is extremely high; most of us need to be
over our heads in trouble before we would hear voices. But in
psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl
I described, only anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary. This
is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of breakdown products of
stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for genetical
reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a normal person.

During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress
threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal
people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that
which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary because of some
novelty in a situation. Anything that could not be dealt with on the
basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack
and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that
required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory
hallucination.

It
has now been clearly established that decision-making (and I would like
to remove every trace of conscious connotation from the word 'decision')
is precisely what stress is. If rats have to cross an electric grid
each time they wish to get food and water) such rats develop ulcers.[11]
Just shocking the rats does not do this to them. There has to be the
pause of conflict or the decision-making stress of whether to cross a
grid or not to produce this effect. If two monkeys are placed in
harnesses, in such a way that one of the monkeys can press a bar at
least once every twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both
monkeys' feet, within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey
will have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not.[12]
It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. For if the
experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an effective response
and receive immediate feedback of his success, executive ulcers, as they
are often called, do not occur.[13]

So
Achilles, repulsed by Agamemnon, in decision-stress by the gray sea,
hallucinates Thetis out of the mists. So Hector, faced with the
decision-suffering of whether to go outside the walls of Troy to fight
Achilles or stay within them, in the stress of the decision hallucinates
the voice that tells him to go out. The divine voice ends the
decision-stress before it has reached any considerable level. Had
Achilles or Hector been modern executives, living in a culture that
repressed their stress-relieving gods, they too might have collected
their share of our psychosomatic diseases.

THE
AUTHORITY OF SOUND

We must
not leave this subject of the hallucinatory mechanism without facing up
to the more profound question of why such voices are believed, why
obeyed. For believed as objectively real, they are, and obeyed as
objectively real in the face of all the evidence of experience and the
mountains of common sense. Indeed, the voices a patient hears are more
real than the doctor's voice. He sometimes says so. "If that is not a
real voice, then I can just as well say that even you are not now really
talking to me," said one schizophrenic to his physicians. And another
when questioned replied:

Yes, Sir. I hear voices distinctly, even loudly; they interrupt us at
this moment. It is more easy for me to listen to them than to you. I
can more easily believe in their significance and actuality, and they do
not ask questions.[14]

That he
alone hears the voices is not of much concern. Sometimes he feels he
has been honored by this gift, singled out by divine forces, elected and
glorified, and this even when the voice reproaches him bitterly, even
when it is leading him to death. He is somehow face to face with
elemental auditory powers, more real than wind or rain or fire, powers
that deride and threaten and console, powers that he cannot step back
from and see objectively.

One
sunny afternoon not long ago, a man was lying back in a deck chair on
the beach at Coney Island. Suddenly, he heard a voice so loud and clear
that he looked about at his companions, certain that they too must have
heard the voice. When they acted as if nothing had happened, he began
to feel strange and moved his chair away from them. And then

. . . suddenly, clearer, deeper, and even louder than before, the deep
voice came at me again, right in my ear this time, and getting me tight
and shivery inside. "Larry jayson, I told you before you weren't any
good. Why are you sitting here making believe you are as good as anyone
else when you're not? Whom are you fooling?"

The deep
voice was so loud and so clear, everyone must have heard it. He got up
and walked slowly away, down the stairs of the boardwalk to the stretch
of sand below. He waited to see if the voice came back. lt did, its
words pounding in this time, not the way you hear any words, but deeper,

. . . as though all parts of me had become ears, with my fingers hearing
the words, and my legs, and my head too. "You're no good," the voice
said slowly, in the same deep tones. "You've never been any good or use
on earth. There is the ocean. You might just as well drown yourself.
Just walk in, and keep walking.”

As soon as the voice was through, I knew by its cold command, I
had to obey it.[15]

The patient walking the pounded sands of Coney
Island heard his pounding voices as clearly as Achilles heard Thetis
along the misted shores of the Aegean. And even as Agamemnon "had to
obey" the "cold command" of Zeus, or Paul the command of Jesus before
Damascus, so Mr. Jayson waded into the Atlantic Ocean to drown. Against
the will of his voices, he was saved by lifeguards and brought to
Bellevue Hospital, where he recovered to write of this bicameral
experience.

In
some less severe cases, the patients, when accustomed to the voices, can
learn to be objective toward them and to attenuate their authority. But
almost all autobiographies of schizophrenic patients are consistent in
speaking of the unquestioning submission, at least at first, to the
commands of the voices. Why should this be so? Why should such voices
have such authority either in Argos, on the road to Damascus, or the
shores of Coney Island?

Sound is a very special modality. We cannot handle it. We cannot push
it away. We cannot turn our backs to it. We can close our eyes, hold
our noses, withdraw from touch, refuse to taste. We cannot close our
ears though we can partly muffle them. Sound is the least controllable
of all sense modalities, and it is-this that is the medium of that most
intricate of all evolutionary achievements, language. We are therefore
looking at a problem of considerable depth and complexity.

The
Control of Obedience

Consider what it is to listen and understand someone speaking to us. In
a certain sense we have to become the other person; or rather, we let
him become part of us for a brief second. We suspend our own
identities, after which we come back to ourselves and accept or reject
what he has said. But that brief second of dawdling identity is the
nature of understanding language; and if that language is a command, the
identification of understanding becomes the obedience. To hear is
actually a kind of obedience. Indeed, both words come from the same
root and therefore were probably the same word originally. This is true
in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Russian, as well as in English,
where 'obey' comes from the Latin obedire, which is a composite
of ob + audire, to hear facing someone.[16]

The
problem is the control of such obedience. This is done in two ways.

The
first but less important is simply by spatial distance.
Think, if
you will, of what you do when hearing someone else talk to you. You
adjust your distance to some culturally established standard.[17]
When the speaker is too close, it seems he is trying to control your
thoughts too closely. When too far, he is not controlling them enough
for you to understand him comfortably. If you are from an Arabian
country, a face-to-face distance of less than twelve inches is
comfortable. But in more northern countries, the conversation distance
most comfortable is almost twice that, a cultural difference, which in
social exchanges can result in a variety of international
misunderstandings. To converse with someone at less than the usual
distance means at least an attempted mutuality of obedience and control,
as, for example, in a love relationship, or in the face-to-face
threatening of two men about to fight. To speak to someone within that
distance is to attempt to truly dominate him or her. To be spoken to
within that distance, and there remain, results in the strong tendency
to accept the authority of the person who is speaking.

The
second and more importantway that we control other people's voice-authority over us is by our
opinions of them. Why are we forever judging, forever criticizing,
forever putting people in categories of faint praise or reproof? We
constantly rate others and pigeonhole them in often ridiculous status
hierarchies simply to regulate their control over us and our thoughts.
Our personal judgments of others are filters of influence. If you wish
to allow another's language power over you, simply hold him higher in
your own private scale of esteem.

And
now consider what it is like if neither of these methods avail, because
there is no person there, no point of space from which the voice
emanates, a voice that you cannot back off from, as close to you as
everything you call you, when its presence eludes all boundaries, when
no escape is possible--flee and it flees with you--a voice unhindered
by walls or distances, undiminished by muffling one's ears, nor drowned
out with anything, not even one's own screaming - how helpless the
hearer! And if one belonged to a bicameral culture, where the voices
were recognized as at the utmost top of the hierarchy, taught you as
gods, kings, majesties that owned you, head, heart, and foot, the
omniscient, omnipotent voices that could not be categorized as beneath
you, how obedient to them the bicameral man!

The
explanation of volition in subjective conscious men is still a profound
problem that has not reached any satisfactory solution. But in
bicameral men, this was volition. Another way to say it is that
volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological
command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in
which to hear was to obey.

[6] Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The
Group of Schizophrenias, Joseph Zinkin, trans. (New York:
International Universities Press, 1950). Other sources for the
sections to follow include my own observations and interviews
with patients, works footnoted on subsequent pages, various
chapters in L. J. West, and miscellaneous case reports.

[17] For those interested in pursuing this
subject, see Edward T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension (New
York: Doubleday, 1966), which stresses the cultural differences,
and Robert Sommer's Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of
Design (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969),
which examines spatial behavior in depth.

Julian Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind, "Chapter 4 The Bicameral Mind"